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latest news and massive todo list.

I heard back from the drive recovery place and they are hard at work recovering the forums. I am looking into some new options for the forums when they officially come back.

I've spent the weekend working on my "YTMND TODO list". I am posting it for you all to see, read more if you are interested and feel free to comment on it.
Before you freak out, realize none of this stuff is set in stone and it's all up for discussion!

[ Legend ]
*- Bug.
@- Possible feature or something I am bugged about constantly.
+- New Feature I want to add.
[ USER LEVELS ]
+- Implement and enforce user levels (somewhat in place).
Level 0: Users who aren't signed in.
Level 1: Users with an account that has not been confirmed.
Level 2: Users with a confirmed account.
Level 4: Paid users.
Level 8: Moderators.
Level 16: Administrators.
Level 255: Max.
[ COMMENTS ]
+- Update the maximum comment length from 256 characters to 512.
@- Nested comments to allow people to reply to comments (requires layout changes)
@-- Maybe use do a mechanism like Livejournal's nested comments.
+- Ability to delete comments on your sites. [ PAID ]
@- Comment paging for sites with a ton of comments, maybe AJAX.
[ SITE CREATION PROCESS ]
Step 1. User goes to create site page.
Step 2. User chooses sound, image, text, all the vitals. (if edit, information is populated)
Step 3. User gets to preview site. If user accepts go to step 4 else step 3.
Step 4. User has to choose between a publicly rated site and a private personal site.
Publicly rated sites:
Is rated in (views list, score list, up and coming, etc.)
Can be found in the search and keywords.
Get auto deleted after 30 days if:
It has less than (100 views or 10 votes) or the score is less than 2.5
Private personal sites:
Don't get rated in any lists.
Can not be found in the keywords or search.
Get auto deleted after 30 days no matter what.
[ PAID users have no auto-deletion. ]
Step 5. Site is locked. User is not allowed to edit the site any further.
In order to edit the site, the user can use the replace function which will
delete the site and hold the domain for the user for 24 hours.
Effectively allowing them to edit the site with a full stat reset. This is done
to keep people from vandalizing sites once they are on the front page.
[ PAID users are allowed to have unlimited edits without stat reset. ]
Step 6. Site goes into moderation queue. [ SEE MODERATION ]
Step 7. Site either goes live or gets killed depending on moderation.
Killed sites stick around for 3 days and an email is sent to the creator letting them know.
[ FILE SYSTEM ]
+- Link to sound and image file on profile page. [ PAID ]
+- "56k" option to prevent users from opening huge sites.
*- Figure out the bug randomly causing sites to be batch edited.
*-- I've already tried editing a site and uploading a previously used sound file.
*-- and editing a site and using a new file.
*-- Things to look into: the asset management system, site creation/editing code.
[ USER PROFILES ]
@- Real user profiles, same sort of information vBulletin has, with some other good info to create fun
@-- statistical information from.
+- Avatars [ PAID ] (would need to figure out where on the site they are shown).
@-- Possibly open up avatars for everyone but allow paid members to have slightly larger avatars.
@- Discuss the addition of user comments and user ratings.
@- Private messaging.
[ SESSIONS ]
+- Standardize sessions, use a wrapper session class.
@- Decide which session engine to use, or if you should just create your own.
*- Figure out why PHP doesn't get the login cookie for some people.
[ KEYWORDS ]
+- Put more keyword info in when users search.
+- Work more on keyword relevance, maybe use a separate Xapian.
+- Add more to keywords interface.
+- Allow users to report keyword abusers.
[ CONTENT BOXES / FRONT PAGE ]
+- Allow customization of content boxes (which to see, what order, etc). [ PAID ]
+- Add new content boxes:
@-- Who's online.
@-- Top Rated Today
@-- Top Rated This Month
@-- Most Views Today (External)
@- Possibly make the entire front page AJAX and live-auto-update.
[ HELP SECTION/FAQ/MEDIA SIGHTINGS/REAL ABOUT PAGE ]
+- A help section with common problems and solutions.
@- Allow people to ask and answer questions with moderation.
+- A CMS so I can stop editing everything with SQL.
[ SITE VIEWS ]
+- Insert a row on each site view with: (IP, site_id, referring url).
+- CRON job uniqify's views and stores a small amount of referring url data.
+- Maybe make Referrers [ PAID ] feature.
[ REPORT THIS SITE FEATURE ]
+- Build a better admin side.
+- Elaborate on information the user can provide, maybe pre-filled drop-downs.
+-- Marked as work safe when not work safe.
[ USER LOGINS ]
+- Clean up and rewrite the code so it uses straight sessions.
+- Redo the c+- Moderation consists of a "best out of five" vote from five regular YTMND users.
+- Users would click the MODERATE link on the top of the page, and be given a random site to moderate.
+- Alternatively site creators could send the link to other registered users or post on the forums
with a link to their site.
+-- When viewed by a non-logged in user, site would show "not moderated yet" message, logged in users would
get moderation interface.
+- Possibly allow a content box on the front page for the moderation queue.
[ RSS FEEDS ]
+- This is a PAID feature. Providing RSS feeds to the public would no doubt cause people to never
+-- visit www.ytmnd.com and only the sub-domains. This would cause a major loss of the revenue YTMND
+-- uses to pay for hosting.
+- RSS feeds for all the content boxes.
+- Search RSS feeds
@- Allow saving of searches as RSS that are updated once every 60 or so minutes? [ PAID ]
@- Or maybe just make a watch-list on searches.
[ YTMND STORE ]
+- Real shopping cart. multiple tables and most likely a separate db.
+- Site sponsorship done through store.
[ FORUMS ]
SEE ALSO: USER SIGNUP, ADMIN.YTMND.COM
+- Decide on vBulletin of SMF
+- Decide on various forums and the rules in each.
+- Integrate the account creation and user signup so there are no longer two accounts.
+- Integrate banning/deletion features so when a user is deleted his forum threads and posts
are deleted as well.
+- Give [ PAID ] users extra features on the forums as well.
+- Change the forum structure so that the "old-schoolers" have a sub forum of their own that
they can moderate and be
+-- in charge of.
[ EMAIL ]
+- Inject a unique message ID and then a qmail script to parse the information into a db.
+-- This way when all the idiots sign up and they require human white-list interaction it can tell them
+-- to fuck themselves when they send 1000 emails to support.
[ SUPPORT ISSUES ]
@- Decide whether or not to buy kayako, would be really useful but requires apache and zend optimizer.
[ ADMIN.YTMND.COM ]
+- Major clean up needed, move to new cvs.
+- More web stuff, less shell scripts.
+- Something other people can use besides me, like moderators and administrators.
[ CLEAN UP ERRORS AND WARNINGS ]
*- All pages that just consist of die messages or warnings should go through an error class of some sort
[ SITE TEMPLATE ]
+- Complete re-do of sound code. Needs to be a lot smarter and take into account user preferences.
+-- For instance, allowing the use of media player on firefox, which would solve a lot of sound woes.
*- Remove stretch code, it doesn't work in Firefox and looks awful in IE.
[ USER SIGNUP ]
+- Rewrite completely.
+- Get more meta data (like age, contact options etc)
+- Make people agree to the TOS
*- Completely redo the captcha without sessions/cookies, it's causing too many problems.
+- Dupe checking, if duplicate email is used offer reset password/resend confirm mail.
[ LISTS ]
+- Create a back end system to manage lists of sites.
+-- Users could create and publish lists of sites.
+-- Back end would allow support for "true" favorite sites.
@- Possibly the ability to have group lists, with managers.
@-- Maybe a global fads list and let people take over maintaining a fad list.

Sounds pretty good, but I don't think the auto-deletion and moderation would be very good. Someone mentioned a "protect/blam" feature, and that seemed like a GREAT idea. Also, the highest rated column should be larger, like 10 or so. Although I really think a "protect/blam" feature would be an EXCELLENT idea. Also, what kind of merchandise are you going to sell? T-shirts and the like?

ANNOUNCEMENT:
I am currently writing and soon to be filming a "documentary" movie on the events of the ebaum forum raids. Filming and editing should be done by March. I will post the movie on my website for free download once it is complete. If anyone has any questions, ideas, DONATIONS, or would like to help out in any way, email me at ytmnd_the_movie@yahoo.com
I think you are all gonna like it!!!!!! ZOMG!!
I'll keep you updated.
ps. I like most of the new ideas Max, but if the movie doesn't suck, can i have free paid privileges?

i have a rather interesting suggestion: what if you put certain sounds (from popular fads) in a spot on the server, so all of the fads that want to use that sound could use it. that way, it would take up much less space on the server. people would also be able to use their own sounds, just as it is now, but if you wanted the "emo" sound, or the "price is right" sound, you could just use the same file. since a lot of fads use the same sounds, i think this would save tons of space on the servers. just a thought.